I live on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, tropical climate, exotic flowers. My garden has been overtaken by ants of all types, first leaf cutters– horendous, but seem to have gotten rid of them, then various non-aggressive types. But for some time now red ones, about 1 cm long, have begun making nests under the centers of plants, digging the dirt up into a hill easily 2 feet above ground level. You can’t hardly see some of the plants! I have used all locally available options; the most favored were granules placed into the nest, but all that happens is they relocate a few feet away. One area has “Luz de Bengal, ” which has several shoots per plant and is so infested that I feel I may have to dig up all the plants. I would REALLY appreciate your help!

Which poison do you normally use / recommend in your gardens? We have had discussions with the leading pest control agencies in our country and every poison they recommend gets turned down on “environmental” grounds. Meanwhile the problem is just exacerbating. I am not sure whether this is, technically, a gardening question, but would greatly appreciate your suggestions. Rat traps would, of course, be used. I don’t think anyone here does an ultrasound method, so that just leaves us with poison used in a very controlled manner under the supervision and control of a responsible company/agency.

Answered by Heather on January 1, 2011Certified Expert

A.

I am not an expert, but I have heard that mixing equal parts of flour, sugar and either baking soda or boric acid (Borax laundry detergent) is an organic, environmentally friendly and effective rat killer. Place it in areas that the rats go and they will eat it. The baking soda one is supposedly also safe for domestic animals as it kills the rats by swelling their stomach, and domestic animals like cats and dogs are able to relieve the swelling by belching and, therefore, are not hurt by the poison.

Stickiness is a tell-tale sign of mealybugs, but not spider mites. Treat the mealybugs with a solution of 5 part water, 1 part alcohol and a squirt of liquid soap. The key to success is less what you use to spray and more how thorough you are in spraying the entire plant, including all leaf and stem surface.If you miss even a few, they will reproduce and come back later.

A systemic solution was recommended by another extension service, but they did not name a product. A systemic product I like is neem oil. It gets into the plants and will kill off anything that eats the plants, so I would add that to the TAMU recommendations.

I have a customer that has moderate scale on about 20 shrubs we recently installed. They don’t appear to be active, leading me to believe the nursery I bought them from has done their job by keeping them sprayed. My question is this: Are scale active in winter time? Does cold weather minimize or kill scale?